I wash up to consciousness and wonder how far I’ll be able to see today, upon being the first to wake at a friend’s house that resides against a blending of bay and ocean. The tide from where I’m sitting in the kitchen doesn’t know which way it’s going, a lot like the way I appear to the cute passerby in leggings to be on a mission to finish my coffee that, if I’m being honest, feels more like a kind of prayer than a way to wake up.
This is what you were born to do, I tell myself, to watch yourself crown from the lips of an undertow-like sleep, the way a mother might watch her teenage child dream, longing to reconnect with her still pregnant, heavy, and nearly unfathomable unborn memory of godliness under uterine sheets of self.
Another jogger runs by the house, and I look down and continue writing this poem the way she keeps reminding herself to crash effortlessly on each step. Morning here by the ocean is a time for her to get moving, to generate a momentum that will carry her from inlets of stillness past waves of regret, en route to the natural wisdom that says not wanting to accept you’re bewildered is something you have in common with pretty much everybody.
She and I, and the tide we both watch and behave like in parallel, but contrary ways, are running past the dream of being reborn, appear to go through the motions of daily living as routinely as the sun rises on the Eastern horizon, as imperceptibly as the water just there coming and going depending on the waterline. The tide going out doesn’t really phase me and just seems to do what all passive things do. It runs past me doing what it does without even remotely thinking about it, and somehow still ends up reflecting all of us.